AND THE ENTIRELY SUPERFLUOUS AWARD GOES TO ...

"Do not judge lest ye be judged." So it sayeth in the Bible. But hey kids, it's Awards Season so strap into your glowinthedark fake sealskin corset and high heeled combat boots, grab your bags of swag, rehearse your spontaneous inappropriate comments and let's collect some trophies

The Oscars, the Grammies, the Junos, Screen Actors, Golden Globes, Raspberries ... it's an orgy of judging art

It's an interesting yet dangerous enterprise, judging art. Judge is not only subjective, it is often designed to be subjective. Art is personal, for the person who creates it and for the person who appreciates it. You look at a painting or read or poem or hear a piece of music or watch a movie and you may say "I don't like it" You mean even say "That sucked" But you're not really judging it, you're reacting to it. You are engaging in the art and even a negative response is still a response, you are reacting to the art, through your experiences and your preferences and it's personal.

That is how art is supposed to work

Yet we have this need to qualify things. "Is it good? Is it awful? Is it great? Is it the best, yeh that's it, is it the best"

Well, is it? How can we tell. How do we access a film, a book, a TV show, a song to determine if one is better than the other. There is something about us that makes us ask these questions For some reason we're not always satisfied that we just like something, that it moves us, that we react to it, we still need to know if it's good

I'm not sure where this comes from. In sports there has to be a winner, Olympic athletes refer to the bronze medal as the "second loser" although they have "beat out" at least dozens of high caliber athletes. 

Then there's school; You get an A, you get an A -, you get an A + ... all of which is pretty much bullshit when you think about it, this shaving away at a label to make it seem more less important to some tiny degree

Can a movie really be better than another movie? Or do you just like it more. 


We like to think that we can judge a movie, or a song or a TV show, on technical merits. Lighting, editing, direction. Sometimes these things are indeed quantifiable. But it still make a difference to whether or not we like it. I've loved some movies that I know, on a technical level, are not good; many of Audi Murphy's westerns (though not all) where cheap, carelessly made B films that I still can enjoy. 

There are also many technically well made movies that do nothing for me. The films of Tony Scott, like Man on Fire and Vengeance, are beautifully shot, well edited and often well acted, but I'd rather watch Audi Murphy where the same outfit over a month of screen time, I just don't find those films engaging

So it seems that even we can apply standards to a work of art, it's still very much subjective. So how do we explain all these awards, how do we explain this judging

I have some personal experience with this. I've been judged and I've been a judge ... but not in the legal sense, or the biblical one

I have entered several competitions, a few for poetry but many more for videos that I've helped create or have fully created. I've won badly and lost well .. or something close to that. I've been critiqued and assessed, and some of it made sense and some of it did not. Generally when I've made these videos I made them for myself, I tried to make the best video I could but I always tried to keep the judges preferences out of it; when I didn't that's usually when I fell on my oh so artistic face

Many people create a video then "shop" it around to competitions. I've rarely done that. Usually I create a video for a competition, be it the films I made for the St Lawrence College video awards, the music video I made for the Moby Hello Future contest; the short film I made for the Amplify Me festival, or an unintentionally creepy short I created for a one minute film fest, I need to be inspired to make fictional videos. I'm a corp video dude at heart and although I'm a writer, I still need some sort of spark to make an "artistic" video. Competitions and contests are a good spark

I've been on the other side of things as well. For many years I judged the St Lawrence College Greg Awards. If you take the judging seriously, it's not an easy thing. Going back to judging technical aspects, you'd think it would be easy: Best Audio goes to the film that actually used a lavalier mic on the interview subjects ... except you learn that after that film used it, the lav broke and no one else had access to it. OK, that probably is not the case with Oscar nominated movies but it just goes to show that nothing is black and white. Unless you made your movie in black and white, for which I would give you artistic kudos ... .unless you had an issue with your camera and you had no choice but to make it black and white

See, it's complicated.

These big televised award shows, well clearly, artistic merit or even technical competency may not be the most important criteria for awarding prizes. Do you smell it? Yes folks, that's the smell of money. To quote an old pop song "all that cash makes a succulent sound"

In that sense, the Grammies may be the most straightforward of all the big award shoes. Money, baby, money. No matter what they tell you it's pretty clear that those who sell the most, win the most. And we want to celebrate this commerce to such a degree that we will keep creating redundant categories so you can win even more awards. Album of the year, record of the year, recording of the year, song of the year, biggest bank account of the year ... you get the idea.

The Oscars are big more complicated. It's not always about money. Certainly in the last few years the Oscars seem to be going about avoiding movies that are sure to make a lot of money. They're probably still embarressed from giving Titantic all this awards. So we gets lists with movies like Birdman and a Boy's Life and Dallas Buyers Club and Silver Linings Playbook.

On the surface, acknowledging and rewarding more "independent" movies seems a noble thing. But it could also be an image-correcting process. As Whoopi opined when the first black actress won an Oscar "We're going to be alright" (or something to that affect) Hollywood is this entirely insular world where their own self image may trump their desire to actually reward movies for being .. you know .. good.

I love Jennifer Lawrence. Her performance in Winter's Bone is still something that gives me goosebumps. But Silver Lining Playbook? One of those films that after watching it you remark "Well, that was a movie"

I think we should give awards to awards. Like Best Redundant Award. Or Best Image Correcting Award. Or Best Award for Something About Which No One Really Gives a Fuck

I'm writing my acceptance speech now